Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Herewith, the list of 100 frequently banned books--that I've read either on my own, or to my children.

1. Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain6. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck7. Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling9. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson13. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger16. Goosebumps (Series) by R.L. Stine18. The Color Purple by Alice Walker20. Earth's Children (Series) by Jean M. Auel22. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle23. Go Ask Alice by Anonymous25. In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak26. The Stupids (Series) by Harry Allard31. Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane37. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood39. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison41. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee42. Beloved by Toni Morrison43. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton47. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes51. A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein52. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley55. Cujo by Stephen King56. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl57. The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell59. Ordinary People by Judith Guest60. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis62. Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume67. The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende69. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut70. Lord of the Flies by William Golding71. Native Son by Richard Wright77. Carrie by Stephen King83. The Dead Zone by Stephen King84. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain85. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison87. Private Parts by Howard Stern88. Where's Waldo? by Martin Hanford89. Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene90. Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman91. Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

OK, folks, I'm stymied. I thought I knew how all this worked, but I think I've been humbled.

After countless woes with some resold hosting space, I've leased a semi-managed server from some folks I know to be reliable. Unfortunately, on this one topic, we seem to be communicating in two different languages. I wish to migrate about twenty existing websites to my new server, which runs Linux and Apache and is fully equipped with cPanel and Web Host Manager, all installed for me.Most of the sites belong to folks for whom I've done design/development work and who retain me to do maintenance and updates. None are very complex.

I find myself lost in the thickets of zones and records, and it's clear I have either omitted a step or two or have not set this up correctly to begin with. The WHM docco is so helpful. It says DON'T CHANGE THIS UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING. (No shit.)

My question: Is there one among this group of mutual journal-readers who could give me some direction and guidance? I can pay you. (It might not be a huge amount, or I might have to pay a bit at a time, but I value everyone's time.) I'm educable and follow directions well.

The topic is junk faxes arriving at our home phone number. They traditionally begin at about 8 a.m. and continue til about noon. A few days ago, I finally had the smarts to hook my fax modem up to the residence line, and I caught someone. I have that fax number and a landline number, as well as a fax.com "removal" number.

The hellish nightmare began this morning. I had a business appointment right across the street at 10 a.m. and was emerging from the shower at about 9:15. Residence phone had rung a time or two with fax beeps.

(Residence phone rings): "Anne, I'm not feeling well. I'm very dizzy, and when I try to stand up I feel as though I'm going to fall down." It's Aged Mum, aged 80--in other words it's non-trivial but not cause for an ambulance. I tell her to stay right there at her apartment, that I will be there.

(Residence phone rings again): Junk fax.

I am down on the first floor. PDA, cell phone, and even Day Timer are up in my office on the third floor. (Yes, this is a very old, Amsterdam-like house.) I find the client's pager number hanging on the fridge and dial it, entering the home number. He calls, but not before another junk fax call comes in. We cancel.

Another junk fax call. I locate doctor's number. Another junk fax call. I dial doctor, get recording, get emergency number. Another junk fax. I dial emergency number, am told to stay by phone and call back in a half hour if I haven't heard. Two fax calls. Has the doctor tried to call and gotten a busy?

After 45 minutes of waiting, I give up and decide to collect Aged Mum and take her to the emergency room. On the way out of the door, there's yet another junk fax call.

The good news is that Aged Mum has not had a stroke. She has an inner ear thing going on, and she'll be fine. But after cooling my heels in the ER for four hours, my rational outlook regarding the faxes has not returned. (There were several beeping messages when I got home.) I will contact the doc tomorrow, as I suspect he was unable to get through.

This, I believe, was a bona fide medical emergency, and it was made infinitely worse by these junk fax calls. In fact, there's a very real possibility that I was prevented from speaking with her physician by them.

As I said in the journal title, I would like to hurt these people--badly. By "hurt" I mean either big money or long jail time. I know there's a law on the books. What's the best recourse? Local Telco? Some national organization? Is there a lawyer who specializes in these cases?

I suspect that, staying in my office tomorrow, I can catch a lot more of these faxes in hard-copy.

I can't believe I've been away for so long. It's a clear, bright Monday, all my bills have been sent out, my spam is deleted, and it was time, in the normal course of things, to go and check out Slashdot.

What have I been doing all this time? Well, a couple of things. First was supposed to be a vacation trip to Colorado. As it turned out, a week before I left, the friend I would be staying with took what should have been a pratfall while working on her car. Only it wasn't a pratfall--she broke the "ball" joint of her shoulder into three large and several smaller bits and wound up in surgery. She reports it's the only time she's ever heard a physician on duty use the f-word, as in "This is really fucked up." Despite that encouragement we enjoyed many cups of coffee while lounging around (alcohol and painkillers being a bad idea), took several drives in the country, and just generally did nothing. So it was a great trip after all, just not an active one.

Home again to a request that began, "We'd like you to do a catalog Website for us. We have 1200 items..." I looked around at every shopping cart I could get my hands on, and for me, the hands-down winner was osCommerce. I was openly gun-shy, having been an observer of what looked like an implosion a couple of years back of php-Nuke. But I have to say, I believe osCommerce embodies just about everything that is right about open source. I found it well-considered, well-designed, full of good features, and more than adequately supported by the user community. I modified the basic installation with several careful contributions and none of them disappointed. It took me about a month with some of that being a learning curve. A surprising amount of time was spent with the client teaching him how to image his products. But I'm happy enough that I turned right around and implemented it on my own, much smaller, site. And I've another in the pipeline.

So now I get to look around and find out how Silly Pixie enjoyed her trip, and what Tuxette is doing with her new certs, and how Ethelred the Younger is settling in, and what everybody's saying about baseball, electronic voting, and other subjects dear to my heart.

Thoughts about a few (very few) books from last night's list that are lifetime favorites of mine. I've added a few from other peoples' lists, and a few that weren't on this list.

Austen, Jane - Pride and PrejudiceIn her quiet way, she seems to nail just what it was like, what went on, and how things were in her own society. Who would our Jane Austen be? For now, I'd have to say Brett Easton Ellis. Authors like this are living time machines, mirrors to their own presents. I might add F. Scott Fitzgerald to the list.

Camus, Albert - The Stranger*As with someone else, I liked "The Plague" better.

Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of CourageNot very well written, even for the stilted prose of his day. I would team it with "All Quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque for a look at what war actually does to the people fighting.

Ellison, Ralph - Invisible ManAn angry book by an angry man--but full of surprisingly witty portraits and observations. It's hard to call a book of this calibre "entertaining," but it truly is. Read also the "Autobiography of Malcolm X," an even angrier man.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet LetterThis is just a damned good story.

Homer - The Odyssey -This book is on my nightstand. I was given it in an obscure translation by a man named Palmer that makes one drunk with the rhythms of the sea. Where the Iliad has always struck me as being about war, testosterone, and stupidity, the Odyssey is more introspective, more home-centered, more grown-up.

London, Jack - The Call of the Wild.I actually like Jack London, too. I said last night I didn't know why, but maybe I've thought about it a bit. There has to be a place on anybody's list for just plain good yarns. Here's one.

Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of SolitudeThis is an intoxicating book.

Miller, Arthur - The CrucibleI hadn't thought about this play in years. It's certainly my favorite of all Arthur Miller's works. I couldn't help wondering how far down this same path we've walked over the past couple of years, and who the Arthur Miller of this generation might be. We're going to need one.

Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front - already paired it with "Red Badge of Courage."Sophocles - Antigone, Oedipus RexDon't forget about "Electra" while you're reading Sophocles. I find it more compelling even than "Oedipus."

Those are a few.

What else is on my nightstand (or in the stack beside my bed)?

"The Shipping News" by E. Annie Proulx. Don't be duped by the boring film. This is a fine book about growth and transformation.

"Night Letters: Inside Wartime Afghanistan" Rob Schulteis. Not this war, but the one they went through ten years ago. This man loves the country and its people. That alone would make the book worth reading, but his prose is beautiful.

"Carry Me Home" Diane McWhorter. The author and I are very close in age. She grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and I spent a substantial part of my youth there. This is what it was like.

OK, following Ethelred. Just bear with me. I'm not only older than God, but I was once a liberal-arts major. Since I majored in romance languages, I stuck an asterisk beside anything I read in the original language. One of these times, I'm going to revisit this and line out what I loved and what I hated. Don't like Faulkner, for example, but I love Jane Austen. I'll devour anything of Jack London's, however inaccurate, because I get mesmerized by tales of the "malevolent north."

There are a couple of authors here whose best work isn't represented (IMO) including George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, George Bernrd Shaw, and maybe James Joyce. And I woefully stopped reading thought-provoking stuff from about 1994 til 2001, when I was a million-miler. That really shows in my list.

Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall ApartAgee, James - A Death in the FamilyAusten, Jane - Pride and PrejudiceBaldwin, James - Go Tell It on the MountainBeckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot*Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie MarchBrontë, Charlotte - Jane EyreBrontë, Emily - Wuthering HeightsCamus, Albert - The Stranger*Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the ArchbishopChaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales (me too on the Middle and modern English).Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry OrchardChopin, Kate - The AwakeningConrad, Joseph - Heart of DarknessCooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the MohicansCrane, Stephen - The Red Badge of CourageDante - Inferno (I'm changing this to "The Divine Comedy" and have read excerpts in English)de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote (modern translation)*Defoe, Daniel - Robinson CrusoeDickens, Charles - A Tale of Two CitiesDostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and PunishmentDouglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick DouglassDreiser, Theodore - An American TragedyDumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers*Eliot, George - The Mill on the FlossEllison, Ralph - Invisible ManEmerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays (Huge gap here...)Faulkner, William - As I Lay DyingFaulkner, William - The Sound and the FuryFielding, Henry - Tom JonesFitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great GatsbyFlaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary*Ford, Ford Madox - The Good SoldierGoethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust (Does hearing the opera innumerable times count??)Golding, William - Lord of the FliesHardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'UrbervillesHawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet LetterHeller, Joseph - Catch-22Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to ArmsHomer - The IliadHomer - The Odyssey - actually one of my favorite pieces of literature, and there is a copy on my nightstand even now. I love it.Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame*Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching GodHuxley, Aldous - Brave New WorldIbsen, Henrik - A Doll's HouseJames, Henry - The Portrait of a LadyJames, Henry - The Turn of the ScrewJoyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young ManKafka, Franz - The MetamorphosisKingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman WarriorLee, Harper - To Kill a MockingbirdLewis, Sinclair - BabbittLondon, Jack - The Call of the Wild. I actually like Jack London, too. Dunno why.Mann, Thomas - The Magic MountainMarquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude (Yes, I actually read this in Spanish and consider that a major accomplishment)*Melville, Herman - Bartleby the ScrivenerMelville, Herman - Moby DickMiller, Arthur - The Crucible (Acted in it, too. Played the part of Rebecca Nurse)Morrison, Toni - BelovedO'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to FindO'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into NightOrwell, George - Animal FarmPasternak, Boris - Doctor ZhivagoPlath, Sylvia - The Bell JarPoe, Edgar Allan - Selected TalesProust, Marcel - Swann's Way (And the entire "Remembrance of Things Past," yes, in French, and did my senior thesis on it)*Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49

I believe this wins the prize for impenetrable spam. This guy has so cleverly concealed his message that I actually can't tell what it is.

Maybe the laws of natural selection will apply and spam will deteriorate to the point where it becomes extinct. Consider the poor sabretooth tiger, whose front tusks became so long and sharp he either couldn't eat or actually had his mouth torn up. We can always hope. Herewith, the spam:

. . . taxes have turned into a major pain in the ass. The version of Quickbooks Pro that we have will no longer export to Turbo Tax. Well, actually the new version of Turbo Tax will no longer accept imports from our version. I'm so mad, I could spit nails. We'd have to update to the latest version - at something like $200!!! Fuck that shit. To make things worse, I feel particularly held up because of course I didn't find this out until I tried to actually *do* his taxes. To add insult to injury, I had to download the latest Turbo-Tax updates - taking basically the better part of an hour. You know, I hold off on buying the program until well into the year, just so I don't have to do that shit. They act like everyone on the planet has either DSL or broadband. I don't and it's a major pain in the ass. Plus, you can't close the window while it does it's thing, which I just think is rude. Yeah, I can pull stuff up and cover the window, but I can't minimize the window. So now Intuit is officially on my shit list. I want to write a very nasty letter to the CEO or whoever. You know, the basic rules of accounting haven't changed in a very long time. There's absolutely no reason to force your users into new versions, unless they actually want the new features. It's strictly a revenue generation scam and I resent the hell out of it.

The packing-up of my Aged Mum proceeds at an excruciatingly slow pace that threatens to kill myself, my brother, and my husband before it will all be over. The work is miserable and dusty, and we are perpetually overpowered by my mother's inability to let go of anything.

Today's trip to the storage bin unearthed two unexpected prizes that may have made the day worthwhile.

First was a thick volume, bound in the old-fashioned way and stamped with gold. The spine read: "Works of Miss Austen." A look inside revealed the works of Jane Austen and a publication date of 1830. The calfskin binding is silken under the hands, still glowing and beautiful, and I believe I will love this book forever.

Second was a forgotten relic of my own childhood, passed down from my mother. That was a copy of Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women." I am told that Ms. Alcott has passed into disfavor. Rumors abound about about her sexual preference (and her sexuality in general), and young girls today are given a severely edited and "sanitized" version of this classic.

I loved and admired Jo March (Alcott's alter ego in the book) as a girl, and I love and admire her still. In fact, I would say that, were she alive today, she would be busily preparing to be a geek, coding in the attic rather than scribbling. Independent, headstrong, and assertive, she would be planning and preparing to make her own way in the world, using her own gifts.

I'm very glad to have found my non-bowdlerized version of this child's classic, and I'm planning to share it whenever possible. As for the Jane Austen, it simply gives glory to the whole idea of "book."

OK, very strange trip last week. The flight was from BWI to BHM, on Southwest. It's a less than two hour deal.

This time I packed to stay for two weeks, and I packed a lot of dress clothes for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture. Clothes, two pairs of shoes, and assorted underwear made a monolithic mass in the medium-sized Samsonite rolling suitcase that is my mainstay. A second, smaller suitcase held assorted jeweler's tools, wires and stringing materials, my kit bag, and a pair of sweats. I checked with Southwest before packing this one, because of all those tools, and was told simply to tell the attendant at check-in. (I checked both bags, again because of the tools.)

To my surprise, when I picked up my baggage, the larger bag had a tie-wrap arrangement in blue secured through the zippers. It bore the legend "TSA" and an inscrutable number. Upon arriving at Aged Mum's and preparing to unpack, I found a very patriotic-looking red, white, and blue card reposing atop the pile of clothes. It said, essentially: "Hello from your friends at TSA. We found it necessary to paw through this bag. It's a good thing you had left it unlocked, otherwise we would have busted the lock. Hail to the Chief."

I have a lot of questions about this. Why, for example, check the bag of LL Bean's best womens' wear while leaving all the sharp objects and wire in the other bag alone? Where is my necklace of pink freshwater pearls that I wear with everything these days? Am I alone in getting the skeeves because they didn't check the bag in my presence? (US Customs, noted for their great surliness, has pawed through my luggage on numerous occasions--always in my presence. Mexican Customs actually extracted a pair of white cotton drawers and held them aloft for all to see--but I was right there to chew them out.) How did browsing through my underwear enable TSA to enhance homeland security? Am I unpatriotic to want my necklace back? Would I feel any better if I didn't know they'd checked the bag? Now that I have had a bag checked, am I somehow marked for life?

I have no idea of the answers to any of these. I don't feel very patriotic at the moment, and I'm as mad as hell about my necklace. If we have to go through this, it would be nice not to get robbed.

No idea why I am feeling so down-hearted about this, but I've finally been the recipient of my first genuine white-supremacist spam, replete with graphical hate-symbols.

What to do about this spam? No idea. I have forwarded it, with headers, to my website host, to the ISP of the forged signature (Earthlink) and to the ISP of the actual mail server (Comcast, with some indication it's in Tennessee...).

I want to do more. I'm angry to have this beautiful new day soiled just as it's beginning. I want to find whoever it is and humiliate them and put a stop to them. I think I really want some kind of revenge.

It has always occurred to me that the spammers' First Amendment rights stop where my right not to communicate with them begins. I still believe that. Probably nothing to do, but if I can find a way to stop them, I'm planning to do it.

The only way that evil can triumph is for good men to do nothing. (Women, too...)

From Yahoo comes this wonderful list of banned words for 2004. At the top of the list is "metrosexual," which apparently describes males who are into fashion and grooming but in reality conjures up visions of illicit hanky-panky on various subway systems.

"Shock and Awe" made the list, and no wonder. I personally credit our friends at CNN with turning this phrase into an instant cliche.

I first heard the term about three days before the actual bombing of Baghdad started. Someone gave details of a book or military paper of some sort that described a total saturation bombing effort. The general idea was to scare the living daylights out of the enemy by giving them a sort of preview of military coming attractions while softening them up. Such an attack was intended to inspire "shock and awe" in the recipients. Dark images of places like Dresden, London, or God forbid, Hiroshima were conjured up. I listened, nodded, and being myself, hoped it would never come to that.

It also conjured up recollections of the "pity and awe" you're supposed to experience while watching a Greek tragedy. Oedipus and Jocasta realize the awful truth. She hangs herself. He, after a bit of angst over her dead body, blinds himself with the brooch from her gown--but lives on to suffer. Pity and awe are the order of the day. It's a kind of saturation bombing of the emotions to be followed by catharsis, which any woman will tell you is just a good cry.

On the day the bombings in Iraq actually started I had escaped from my computer to have lunch with an old friend. Afterward, I went to a mall bookstore and saw a cluster of folks gathered around an ominous-looking television picture. The eerie green night scope revealed huge explosions in Baghdad, while the speaker yielded enormous crashes and booms. It didn't take long to figure out what was going on.

Of course the good folks at CNN were there to remove all doubt:

-OK, ladies and gentlemen. Here's some actual footage of the shock and awe.-This is the shock and awe bombing. You're seeing it live on CNN.-We're bringing you live footage of the scene in Baghdad as the American shock and awe efforts get under way.-Step right up, get yer shock'n'awe here. Hurry, hurry, hurry!

Bingo! The bombing started, and ten minutes later, a cliche was born. How many times can you use the term "shock and awe" before we break for commercial? It's like the Greek play, only it's a saturation bombing of our linguistic sensibilities followed appropriately by nausea and boredom.